We have a customer who sent a foreign wire. The beneficiary claims they have not gotten the money. Our wire department says "oh yeah, it can take a while, and we don't have any way to track it." Is this accurate? Our compliance officer now thinks we need to disclose this to customers who initiate a foreign wire. Can anyone provide me any guidance?

Your wire department is right in that foreign wires can take a while to reach their destination, but they are wrong about no way to track it. They should be able to put a trace on the wire with whoever you deal with for this service, if they can't do that for you then find a new correspondant.

Many times a wire can get to a 'third world' country and the processing time slows down drastically. So this is not unusual - it's not a compliance issue to disclose this, rather a customer service issue.

There are several scenarios here...first, is is a US dollar wire or a wire converted to foreign currency and sent. If US$, likely it was sent thru a US correspondent, and that is where you should start tracking. Contact them and ask them to open an investigation. If the receiving account is not a US$ account, that can delay the payment, as can any missing information from the sender or receiver. If it was converted to foreign currency prior to sending, the correspondent likely went through SWIFT, which also has an excellent capability for performing investigations. In fact, there is a SWIFT message type (think it is 942 but haven't dealt with SWIFT in a while and I could be wrong) for investigations. SWIFT wires take no more than 2 days to get to the destination if all info is correct. US$ wires can take up to 6 days, depending on what country it is going to and how many correspondent banks it touches.

I know this isn't directly related to the original question but can someone recommend a good correspondent for foreign wires, foreign check collections and foreign currency orders. Ours just increased their fees by 180%.

Thank you.

Island, you're not alone. We are looking for the same reason. We have it down to 2. I have a demo scheduled tomorrow for one of them.

Would you mind sharing some of the names?
Thank you.

IslandBank,
PM me and I would happy to give you the names of who we have been looking at.